I am forced to drive a car by the enviromental factors and also me voting the “force me to drive a car” party at every election
don’t @ me about vooooooooooooating
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Basically every last village in the UK used to have a train station… a fucking century ago. We’ve only recently exceeded the absolute numbers of rail passengers back then.
A state-sanctioned private rail monopoly initially fucked stuff up for a couple decades. Then nationalisation plus incoming neoliberal attitudes decided to do as it does and deliberately run everything into the ground for a few decades before deciding private companies could actually extract profit by gouging people. And that’s how it is to the modern day.
After Beeching cuts closed 50% of stations in 1960, in the 1980s Thatcher tried to finish the job and close 80% of the remaining mileage. That was thankfully initially rejected due to public backlash, but as always it was just sneakily implemented over time in the background instead. It was all in effort to save money, and practically zero money was saved. Turned out when people need to own a car they stop using the train.
I’ve lived in three different villages all over the island that used to have rail stations before those cuts and now have nothing. A century ago it was economically viable to service my village that then had like 400 people in it with its own station. Now with modern technology and a hugely expanded population, you can’t tell me it’s not a viable idea now.
TL;DR: Every remote population centre should have its own train station and you can’t convince me otherwise
If you can connect it by road, you can connect it by rail 🤷
Every remote population centre should have its own train station and you can’t convince me otherwise
There aren’t really many remote population centers anymore. Everything is connected to the power grid and most other utilities. Public transportation is a utility and not having it is nonsense.
Where exactly do you live to have:
a) Multiple candidates in a rural election
b) Candidate running on expanding public transportation
c) Rural people who wouldn’t sell their firstborn to get public transportation
governor vote matters there. wisconsin turned down some federal grant to build passenger rail because a republican was in office and a bunch of rural chuds could’ve voted for the democrat instead.
Have democrats meaningfully attempted to expand public transportation in Wisconsin into rural areas when they are in office?
I have family there who I asked.
“Yes, like, repeatedly prior to that point. There haven’t been any real attempts since Walker blew up the Madison-Milwaukee HSR, but that was a 20 or 30 year old legal project that was literally at the point of having shovels in hands when he did.”
My thoughts: what the fuck. A Republican governor, Tommy Thompson, initiated the project in the 90s, and Scott Walker blew up the last step (accepting the money) to deny Obama a win. It would have put a 125 mph Acela train between the two biggest cities.
Looks like Thompson backtracked on establishing a light rail network in Milwaukee which would have built 10 miles of rails downtown, and instead they have built 2.5 miles of streetcar service.
Really? Neat. Shame they didn’t get it.
Disappointed yet not shocked to learn that the state is actively suppressing their ability to have a streetcar service.
idk i don’t live there. public transit needs a certain population density to operate so it doesn’t make sense to have it in farm country where it’s miles between neighbors and your biggest towns are like four blocks.
dems probably better fund rural school busses, and rail from chicago to green bay to minneapolis or whatever it was would’ve benefitted some of them.
Intercity rail starts making sense at shockingly small populations.
As far as I can tell Amtrak currently has 528 stations in the US and Canada. The UK’S National Rail currently has 2589. That might be a bit ambitious to match, but 1000 stations could cover every municipality with over 50,000 people in the US and Canada. I wish we lived in this world.
yeah for sure. there’s a lot of 1-horse towns that are less than 5% of that size tho, especially in the rural midwest. i think where my grandparents live is barely over 2k. when i was little it was under 1k and the town only had two cops and they had to share an old crown vic.
I miss her 😭
Yeah, it would be hard to cover every population center, but I feel like many of those places have a nearby town that’s accessible and quite a bit bigger. The next town over where people go if they need to do something their town doesn’t have. There are only about 5000 municipalities total with 10,000 or more people, but I feel like almost the entire population lives less than an hour from one of those.
See, that would make sense from a leftist perspective, but remember that Democrats are not leftists. In my experience, the way you get positive change is by rallying your community and doing it yourself, and when you’re done someone will come take credit for your work.
americans are always like “why should we invest in public transport? public transport sucks! one time i tried to take a bus and [story about how bad the service was and how inefficient it was in getting to the destination]. so why would anyone want more of this bad thing?”
yeah one time i was stuck in traffic so why’d you want even more lanes tog get stuck in traffic in
Driving is so stressful I hate it
I had to ditch my 12 year old econobox. Switched to an EV.
I still hate driving, but modern safety features (proximity sensors and cameras) are a bit better at least.
I still would prefer a train though.
I still would prefer a train though.
and the train needs to fucking run and it needs to be cheaper than two people in a car.
i had a situation where there was a train but the last one was at 10pm and the event i’d want to go to in the city went until 10:30 99% of the time. But it gets worse, even if a trip fit during operating hours two tickets was more expensive than gas and depreciation so we’d drive, and it was about the same time door to door because walking is slow af and the train had a few stops.
We need our ego checked as a species, less than a year of informal training for a lifetime operating 2-6 ton trash bins at high speeds is just not a good decision.
“it’s everyone else that can’t drive!” No homie it’s you too, it just doesn’t matter when there’s no one around you
It’s the other drivers. The only time I enjoy driving is when I’m off work and it’s like 3am and there’s nobody else on the road.
So I get a double whammy experience of the “fuck yeah off work” dopamines and it’s low stress.
The other 99% of driving can fuck off, put me in a train
I hate driving for various reasons and UK public transport is very unreliable and the trains are infamously expensive. I prefer to cycle when I can.
Ya wait I don’t get it. I mean I love public transit and I get that the boonies ain’t got it. But why you voting against it? Is there some anti trans chud who says “bus good”? If so this is a new type of guy I must experience
Given what OP said, it seems like it’s less a case of “voting against transit” and more “voting against murdering LGBTQ+ people (+ no public transit)”
I think he’s also aware that harm reduction through voting is a dubious idea at best.
Ya most likely. I’m definitely not saying OP is wrong I just don’t get it. American politics continues to baffle
